Lecture organised in the framework of the second edition of the Amílcar Cabral Prize, awarded to Sakiru Adebayo, a scholar of African literature.

Ethical Afropolitanism:

Reading Africa’s Mobile Subjects in Helon Habila’s Travellers

Sakiru Adebayo (University of British Colombia)

This lecture examines the possibility of ethical relations between privileged and underprivileged African subjects in the West. It asks: in this age of Mediterranean crossings, at the heart of which are many forcibly displaced African, what can the Afropolitan do? In this era of the global refugee crisis in which millions of Africans are rendered stateless, does it become imperative for Afropolitans and other elite African travellers to be stakeholders in the conversation? What might the terms and conditions of engagement between the affluent Afropolitan and the abject African migrant in the Global North look like? To answer these questions, I look at the ethical dimensions of the representation of African refugees through the eye of an Afropolitan in Helon Habila’s Travellers. Put differently, with Habila’s Travellers, I dissect one Afropolitan man’s ethical journey through the abyss of the European migrant crisis at the centre of which are many involuntary African travellers. I investigate the ways in which the novel formulates and complicates un/ethical encounters between the Afropolitan and the stateless African in the diaspora. In my reading of the novel, I argue that an ethical substantiation of the concept of Afropolitanism has the potential to rescue it from its purported theoretical shallowness. I also argue that the Afropolitan project is futile if it fails to acknowledge and accommodate the presence of stateless Africans in Western metropoles. Overall, this talk is an attempt at bringing ethics into the Afropolitan discourse, it is an attempt at theorising an Afropolitan ethics of mobility.

About the speaker:
Sakiru Adebayo received the Amílcar Cabral Prize 2022.
He is Assistant Professor of  English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Colombia (Canada). His research ranges from topics such as African Literature, The New African Diaspora, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Memory Studies, to Melancholy Studies.
Born in Ijebu Igbo, a town in Southwestern Nigeria, he moved to Ibadan to study at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university. He later moved to Johannesburg, South Africa for his Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) for a year.

Picture: Cover of the book Travellers, by Helon Habila.